I'm on a journal at a t-14 school. I have a summer job lined up at a biglaw firm. I hate journal -- It's absolutely horrible.

I have zero interest in taking on any sort of e-board position or doing anything more than the bare minimum while riding out this miserable experience. Nevertheless, some people actually appear interested in this sort of thing. Assuming you have a summer job and no interest in clerking, what's the point of going for an e-board position? Is there any benefit? Why would anyone want to do this?

Yeah jobs and clerking are the only reason to do it (so say my board members). I have a ton of interest in doing it, but that's because I don't have a job. If I were to get a job today, I would probably consider not even doing law review next year. Law Review is a horrible fucking thing, and does not provide nearly the job boost it is advertised to provide.

Geist13 wrote:Yeah jobs and clerking are the only reason to do it (so say my board members). I have a ton of interest in doing it, but that's because I don't have a job. If I were to get a job today, I would probably consider not even doing law review next year. Law Review is a horrible fucking thing, and does not provide nearly the job boost it is advertised to provide.

I disagree. I think the job boost was pretty decent, and I doubt I'd have the job I do now if I didn't have LR. It's not a golden ticket, but it is a sizeable boost.

I will agree with LR is worthless though, and I am also considering not even doing law review next year. I am just concerned with how my job would take it, and I would have to buy my own sodas and snacks when I'm at school instead of plundering the LR office.

JoeMo wrote:As a 0L does anyone care to enlighten me as to why it's worthless and why it's such a horrible thing? Obviously I don't know much about the process thus have no idea what makes it such an awful thing.

Legal scholarship is intellectually masturbatory horse shit. Then you have to check the citations to that horse shit.

JoeMo wrote:As a 0L does anyone care to enlighten me as to why it's worthless and why it's such a horrible thing? Obviously I don't know much about the process thus have no idea what makes it such an awful thing.

Legal scholarship is intellectually masturbatory horse shit. Then you have to check the citations to that horse shit.

+1. Literally no one reads law review articles, except students and professors who are writing more law review articles. It is intellectual circle jerking in a very real sense, with each "scholar" jerking off the next "scholar," and then another "scholar" comes in and jerks him off in response, and so on and so forth. They have little significance in the real world, and yet thousands of steaming piles of law review poop are churned out by students and faculty every year.

JoeMo wrote:As a 0L does anyone care to enlighten me as to why it's worthless and why it's such a horrible thing? Obviously I don't know much about the process thus have no idea what makes it such an awful thing.

Legal scholarship is intellectually masturbatory horse shit. Then you have to check the citations to that horse shit.

+1. Literally no one reads law review articles, except students and professors who are writing more law review articles. It is intellectual circle jerking in a very real sense, with each "scholar" jerking off the next "scholar," and then another "scholar" comes in and jerks him off in response, and so on and so forth. They have little significance in the real world, and yet thousands of steaming piles of law review poop are churned out by students and faculty every year.

JoeMo wrote:As a 0L does anyone care to enlighten me as to why it's worthless and why it's such a horrible thing? Obviously I don't know much about the process thus have no idea what makes it such an awful thing.

Legal scholarship is intellectually masturbatory horse shit. Then you have to check the citations to that horse shit.

+1. Literally no one reads law review articles, except students and professors who are writing more law review articles. It is intellectual circle jerking in a very real sense, with each "scholar" jerking off the next "scholar," and then another "scholar" comes in and jerks him off in response, and so on and so forth. They have little significance in the real world, and yet thousands of steaming piles of law review poop are churned out by students and faculty every year.

Well, what do you expect professors to do with their time, teach?

Great... writing off any inclination to do LR even if I am so fortunate as to be offered a position. Thanks for the info y'all.

JoeMo wrote:As a 0L does anyone care to enlighten me as to why it's worthless and why it's such a horrible thing? Obviously I don't know much about the process thus have no idea what makes it such an awful thing.

Legal scholarship is intellectually masturbatory horse shit. Then you have to check the citations to that horse shit.

JoeMo wrote:As a 0L does anyone care to enlighten me as to why it's worthless and why it's such a horrible thing? Obviously I don't know much about the process thus have no idea what makes it such an awful thing.

Here's a summary of my law review duties:

Citechecking: You get a section of the article and are responsible for making sure that the article is properly blue booked and is grammatically correct and that every proposition is supported by external authority. That doesn't sound too bad. Except the authors don't know anything about bluebooking. Literally every footnote is filled with errors. Oh is this comma italicized, I can't tell. Let me get my magnifying glass. Oh, shit I forgot whether that word is supposed to be abbreviated. Fuck me, how the hell do you cite a DVD?! Um this quote doesn't come from the book you said it does. Now I have to go on a wild goose hunt to find where it did come from. This goes on for roughly 40-50 hours per article that you citecheck (1 article per issue). Then you come to a page and the author didn't footnote anything. Well that's fine with me you say. But NO. EVERY fucking sentence has to be supported. So you have to find articles and books and cases that say what the author is saying. Meanwhile you have to field questions from your fellow staff members. "Do you know what type of dash we're supposed to use in statutes?" No go fucking clue look it up yourself, and stop slurping your goddamn soup so loudly.

Source Pulling: I get a list of sources that I need to find for an article that will get edited next week. That sounds kind of fun, its like a treasure hunt! Look, these are all cases and journal articles, I can just print these off of westlaw, right? NOO. You have to go find a fucking tangible hard copy of every source cited, just in case westlaw missed a "the." Oh but our library doesn't carry this journal; that means I can just print it off of westlaw right? NO. Go try the library accross town (which takes 35 minutes to get to), sign up for a library card at that library, look to see if they have it, check it out, bring it back here, and don't forget to renew the book when it's due, the journal won't re-imburse you for late fees. Even better, you get a really hard article. "Um, this author is citing Japanese statutes. Do we have those in this library?" Editor: "How should I know?" Me: "oh well I thought since you're in charge of this article you may have some suggestions on where I could find them." Editor: Nope, good luck though Me: can I print it off the web? Editor: No, That's a last resort, come back to me after looking for a week.

Note writing: You pick a topic, its great a subject you're interested in, you can see yourself working on it for a while. You spend tons of time writing it really well. You get your feedback: This needs to be totally re-organized, our journal doesn't allow Notes to be published under any organizational scheme than this one listed in your manual. Me: but my topic can't fit that format. I tried, it ends up being really choppy and doesn't flow well. Note editor: that doesn't matter, it has to be in this format. Me: ok, well do you have any other suggestions? Note Editor: Not really, my Note wasn't very good they wouldn't publish it. Me: wait so you wrote a really bad Note and are now in charge of instructing me on how to write mine? Editor: yes.

The most infuriating thing about associate editor work is how manufactured it is--no journal would actually pay anybody to do this worthless work, but they need something to keep the 40 or so new editors they bring on each year busy. I'm especially thinking of the source gathering process and its hard copy requirement--there is absolutely no way the people writing these articles are using hard copy annotated codes and reporters, yet we're required to hunt these down anyway.

Ed. board work seems a little bit more substantive, but still boring and with a more significant time commitment. I also don't like the idea of 3Ls telling legitimate legal scholars how they should write their articles. I'm sure a lot of articles have lots of room for improvement, but it's a pretty pathetic system compared to actual peer review.

goodolgil wrote:The most infuriating thing about associate editor work is how manufactured it is--no journal would actually pay anybody to do this worthless work, but they need something to keep the 40 or so new editors they bring on each year busy. I'm especially thinking of the source gathering process and its hard copy requirement--there is absolutely no way the people writing these articles are using hard copy annotated codes and reporters, yet we're required to hunt these down anyway.

Ed. board work seems a little bit more substantive, but still boring and with a more significant time commitment. I also don't like the idea of 3Ls telling legitimate legal scholars how they should write their articles. I'm sure a lot of articles have lots of room for improvement, but it's a pretty pathetic system compared to actual peer review.

I don't know if other have had the same experience, but the two articles I've edited so far were atrocious. I suppose the substance made sense but the authors used terrible sentence structure and syntax. I had no problem telling the authors how to write after they turned in such a wordy mess.

goodolgil wrote:The most infuriating thing about associate editor work is how manufactured it is--no journal would actually pay anybody to do this worthless work, but they need something to keep the 40 or so new editors they bring on each year busy. I'm especially thinking of the source gathering process and its hard copy requirement--there is absolutely no way the people writing these articles are using hard copy annotated codes and reporters, yet we're required to hunt these down anyway.

Technology journal FTW. For us, if they have an online source we can use it . Add that to no required note, and cite checking/source gathering assignments that consisted of 10 cites each, and about 3x during the semseter and it really wasn't that bad. I think I just picked the right journal.

Also, I applied and interviewed for ed/exec board. Maybe I'm crazy and I know it's a time suck, but whatever, it's not like I really have anything better to do.

keg411 wrote:\Technology journal FTW. For us, if they have an online source we can use it . Add that to no required note, and cite checking/source gathering assignments that consisted of 10 cites each, and about 3x during the semseter and it really wasn't that bad. I think I just picked the right journal.

Also, I applied and interviewed for ed/exec board. Maybe I'm crazy and I know it's a time suck, but whatever, it's not like I really have anything better to do.

Yeah the technology journal at my school also has very liberal policies. But 10 source citechecks? My God. My current cite-checking assignment is 72 footnotes.

JoeMo wrote:As a 0L does anyone care to enlighten me as to why it's worthless and why it's such a horrible thing? Obviously I don't know much about the process thus have no idea what makes it such an awful thing.

Here's a summary of my law review duties:

Citechecking: You get a section of the article and are responsible for making sure that the article is properly blue booked and is grammatically correct and that every proposition is supported by external authority. That doesn't sound too bad. Except the authors don't know anything about bluebooking. Literally every footnote is filled with errors. Oh is this comma italicized, I can't tell. Let me get my magnifying glass. Oh, shit I forgot whether that word is supposed to be abbreviated. Fuck me, how the hell do you cite a DVD?! Um this quote doesn't come from the book you said it does. Now I have to go on a wild goose hunt to find where it did come from. This goes on for roughly 40-50 hours per article that you citecheck (1 article per issue). Then you come to a page and the author didn't footnote anything. Well that's fine with me you say. But NO. EVERY fucking sentence has to be supported. So you have to find articles and books and cases that say what the author is saying. Meanwhile you have to field questions from your fellow staff members. "Do you know what type of dash we're supposed to use in statutes?" No go fucking clue look it up yourself, and stop slurping your goddamn soup so loudly.

Source Pulling: I get a list of sources that I need to find for an article that will get edited next week. That sounds kind of fun, its like a treasure hunt! Look, these are all cases and journal articles, I can just print these off of westlaw, right? NOO. You have to go find a fucking tangible hard copy of every source cited, just in case westlaw missed a "the." Oh but our library doesn't carry this journal; that means I can just print it off of westlaw right? NO. Go try the library accross town (which takes 35 minutes to get to), sign up for a library card at that library, look to see if they have it, check it out, bring it back here, and don't forget to renew the book when it's due, the journal won't re-imburse you for late fees. Even better, you get a really hard article. "Um, this author is citing Japanese statutes. Do we have those in this library?" Editor: "How should I know?" Me: "oh well I thought since you're in charge of this article you may have some suggestions on where I could find them." Editor: Nope, good luck though Me: can I print it off the web? Editor: No, That's a last resort, come back to me after looking for a week.

Note writing: You pick a topic, its great a subject you're interested in, you can see yourself working on it for a while. You spend tons of time writing it really well. You get your feedback: This needs to be totally re-organized, our journal doesn't allow Notes to be published under any organizational scheme than this one listed in your manual. Me: but my topic can't fit that format. I tried, it ends up being really choppy and doesn't flow well. Note editor: that doesn't matter, it has to be in this format. Me: ok, well do you have any other suggestions? Note Editor: Not really, my Note wasn't very good they wouldn't publish it. Me: wait so you wrote a really bad Note and are now in charge of instructing me on how to write mine? Editor: yes.

This is one of the best posts I have ever read on this board.

The pure, true anger that flows from each keystroke is fantastic.

The last part is hysterical. The editor who is in charge of you had work rejected? That's fucking rich.